The present invention relates to character recognition systems and more particularly to a method and apparatus for checking whether a complete image of the character is scanned and captured by a hand held scanning system.
Many character recognition systems currently available use the technique of "mask matching" in recognizing the unknown character. This technique involves the matching or correlation between the character to be recognized and a set of standard character masks. In scanning the unknown character, scanning means such as hand held optical readers generate electrical signals representing both the character scanned and the background scanned. To provide sufficient information to the character recognition logic to recognize the character scanned, the complete character must be scanned together with information as to the direction of the scanning of the character. It has been found that if the scanner is moved at an angle to the characters on the documents, portions only of the characters are scanned resulting in data which is unable to be used in recognizing the characters. Prior scanning systems have utilized costly complex circuits to check if the complete character has been scanned and to determine the direction of scan. These circuits are usually located in the processor which performs the recognition process. It is therefore the principal object of this invention to provide a low cost system for capturing the complete image of a character scanned in a predetermined direction by an optical scanner unit. It is a further object of this invention to provide such a system for disabling the transfer of data to a processor when the data presented does not completely describe the scanned character. It is another object of this invention to provide a system for indicating the direction of scan of the scanning unit.